Declare

when spies were trendy—everyone was reading Vadim Kozhevnikov’s Shield and Sword , a novel about a brave Soviet spy in World War II, and the youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda was running a serial about the adventures of a beautiful KGB girl named Natasha—but Philby seemed to have become a recluse.
    None of the journalists could tell Hale how to find Philby, and he didn’t dare to show more than casual, morbid interest. A New York Times man told Hale that he had seen Philby dining at the Aragvy Restaurant by the Bolshoi Theatre with two KGB men, who were distinguishable as such because they had been wearing the new pale-green fedoras available only in the privileged hard-currency stores; and a woman from The Saturday Evening Post told Hale that she had seen a man who looked like Kim Philby trying, speaking English, to order a new Pagoda brand washing machine in a parking-lot black market on the southern loop of the Sad Sam. The most recent Moscow telephone directory had been published in 1958, and the four-volume set had gone out of print immediately and had never been reprinted. Journalists and Muscovites amassed private telephone directories by writing down and sharing the names of all the parties they had got by wrong number connections—which were frequent—but none of these informal telephone books that Hale could get a look at had a listing for Philby.
    Hale made no effort to live his journalistic cover story. He walked by the Aragvy Restaurant every day at noon and dusk, hoping to glimpse Philby, and in the evenings he nibbled cucumber-and-tomato zakusi in the bar of the Metropol, drank vodka at the Soviet-skaya and purple vermouth koktels at the Moskva—but he did not succeed in catching a glimpse of his half-brother.
    When there were only three days left until the twenty-second of April, Hale reluctantly decided to look for Philby among the Gray People. This was the name given by the Sad Sam journalists to the Western expatriates who had defected and become Soviet citizens, and who all seemed to work for the Foreign Languages Publishing House, paid by the line for translating the speeches of Party members into English. They were said to be a furtive colony, inordinately proud of their various shabby treasons, and sure that the CIA or the SIS or the SDECE would pay dearly for the chance of arresting them. And all of them would reportedly turn pale with envy at the sight of a valid Western passport.
    It was bad form to try to socialize with them, and Hale understood too that any such efforts were likely to draw the attention of the KGB, with the probable consequence of revocation of one’s visa, and speedy expulsion from the U.S.S.R.
    Hale had considered simply going to St. Basil’s Cathedral on Wednesday the twenty-second of April, without visiting Philby first. But he did want to be able to fly out of the Soviet Union, afterward.
    And Hale finally found the Gray People on the afternoon of Tuesday the twenty-first, in Khokhlovskaya Square on the eastern loop of the Sadovaya Samotechnaya ring road, at the black market for books. Here, unmolested even by the city police, the Moscow intellectuals in their shapeless clothes sorted through stacks of books in the watery sunlight, looking for Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care and illegal mimeographed copies of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. The many mimeograph texts, stapled or sewn with yarn, were known as samizdat and were illegal, lacking the Glavlit stamp of approval; aside from the Pasternak, these blurry texts seemed to be mostly modern poetry, anti-government satire, crude witchcraft, and pornography.
    The native Muscovites were easily distinguishable from the Gray People. The latter tended either to cluster together in threes and fours or to visibly avoid their fellows, and their voices were quieter, petulant, and nervous.
    Hale picked out one middle-aged man who had snapped, “Leave me alone, will you?” to another man in English, and Hale followed him when he began shambling away alone with—good sign!—a samizdat copy of Mikhail Bulgakov’s satire of the Stalinist regime, The Master and Margarita, wrapped tightly in brown paper.
    Hale managed to hurry around through the linden trees in front of his quarry, so as to approach him from ahead; and he made sure to have a British ten-pound note in his hand when he spoke.
    “Excuse me,” Hale said, smiling, “I appear to be lost. Do you know the city